Why I Bought My Company Back

In 2024, I reacquired Tactful AI — the company I co-founded in 2016 and sold in 2022. People keep asking me why. The honest answer is not strategic. It is simpler than that: the best version of it had not been built yet.

A management buyback is the process of a founder reacquiring full ownership of a company they previously sold — buying it back from the acquirer to restore independent control and the original product vision. In MENA, it is nearly unprecedented. Most founders who exit do not come back.

This is the story of the decision — and the decade that led to it.

Act I: The Build

Before Tactful existed, I spent a decade in semiconductor engineering. I worked at Silicon Vision in Cairo — which Synopsys later acquired — and then at ARM Holdings in Cambridge, where I spent over five years in the Systems Group managing product lines across high-performance compute, automotive, and IoT. Semiconductors teach you something that most software people never learn: infrastructure is layers, and each layer has a contract with the layers above and below it. When you design a processor core, you do not think about the end user's application. You think about the interface between your layer and the next.

That discipline — abstraction, interfaces, governance — became the foundation for everything I built afterwards.

I founded Tactful in 2016 with Mohamed Hassan while still working at ARM. For more than five years, I ran both — ARM during the day, Tactful in every other hour. This was not a side project. It was a deliberate overlap. I did not leave a comfortable Cambridge job to chase a startup dream. I built Tactful in parallel until it was real enough to demand my full attention.

When I looked at the customer experience industry in 2016, I saw a landscape that resembled computing in the 1990s. Dozens of point solutions. No shared infrastructure. Every company bolting together chatbots, ticketing systems, knowledge bases, and CRMs with duct tape and API calls. The result was predictable: fragmented data, ungoverned AI, and customer interactions falling through the cracks between systems.

We built from Cairo with 60+ engineers. We did not outsource. We did not hire contractors. We recruited fresh graduates from Cairo University, Ain Shams, and AAST, and we turned them into infrastructure engineers. Over six years, we invested $5M+ in R&D and shipped real enterprise customers — Elaraby Group, valU, Fairmont, Address Hotels, Lazurde, Bosta, Raneen. We built a five-layer CX stack: channels, resolution brain, action layer, system of record, and ops governance.

For six years, we built patiently, technically, deliberately.

Act II: The Acquisition Chapter

In 2022, Dstny, a European business communications group, acquired Tactful. A MENA-built AI platform joining a European company — that narrative does not happen often enough in our region. The partnership brought European distribution, enterprise credibility, and a perspective I could not have gained from the inside.

I held a Partner role in Brussels during this chapter. It was a valuable period. I learned how large communications companies operate at scale, how European enterprise sales and go-to-market works, and — most importantly — I saw Tactful's strengths through a lens that was impossible when I was in the middle of building it every day. Distance from your own company sharpens your vision for it.

What grew clearer during that period was that Tactful's next chapter — the shift toward agentic CX, the full autonomous resolution infrastructure — needed the founding team to have complete autonomy. Not because anyone was doing anything wrong. Because the ambition of what we wanted to build required the kind of singular focus and speed that only comes with full founder control.

The conviction that Tactful's best version had not been built yet grew stronger every month. Not weaker. That clarity was the acquisition's greatest gift.

Act III: The Return

Mohamed Hassan and I reacquired full ownership of Tactful in 2024. We reached a mutual agreement with Dstny that allowed Tactful to pursue its vision independently. Founder-led returns after acquisition are rare anywhere in the world. In MENA, it is nearly unprecedented. Most founders who exit do not come back to the same company. They start something new, or they step back entirely. We chose to go back to the same company, the same codebase, the same customers, many of the same engineers.

I was not starting from zero. I was starting from $5M+ in accumulated R&D, a platform that processed millions of customer interactions, and a team that had stayed because they believed in what we were building.

Within months, the signals started compounding. Mohamed Nagaty — who co-founded Halan, served as a director at Careem before its $3B+ acquisition by Uber, and now runs Exits — joined as an investor and strategic advisor. When an operator with that track record puts capital and time into a post-buyback company, it is not a courtesy. It is a bet.

In February 2026, we raised a $1M Pre-Series A co-led by Foras AI and M Empire. The angel investors were all deep-tech operators: Omar Gabr, co-founder of Instabug; Mohamed Samir, founder of Si-Bits; Ahmed Fakhry, co-founder of Infinilink. These are people who understand what it takes to build infrastructure — not generalist VCs writing small checks across a portfolio. They chose Tactful because they understood the technical moat.

The platform is seeing 100x growth in usage over the past twelve months. The team is energised in a way I have not seen since the earliest days.

People sometimes frame the buyback as nostalgia. It is not. It is not about ego either. A reacquisition is a bet that you now have the clarity to build the version you could not build before. You need both the conviction and the capability. Conviction without capability is delusion. Capability without conviction is consulting. The two years away gave me both — the conviction that the vision was right and the operational clarity to execute it differently.

Every chapter of this story happened from Cairo. The founding. The growth. The acquisition. The reacquisition. The fundraise. People ask me why I do not relocate to London or Dubai. The answer is the same every time: the talent here is extraordinary, and I am not willing to build somewhere that forces me to choose between cost and quality.

The strategic clarity I gained during those two years away is something I wrote about in Why I Build World-Class AI from Cairo, Not London — why the team, the city, and the economics are not constraints but advantages. And the infrastructure thesis that drives everything we are building now is the subject of The CX Industry Has a Tool Problem. The engineering discipline beneath all of it — the one I carried from semiconductors into software — is in What Semiconductor Design Taught Me About Building Software Platforms.

The company is ten years old. I am building it like it is year one. But this time, I know what the next version looks like.